Telling the Truth About the Election by Asad Haiderwww.dissidentvoice.org
September 25, 2004

“To tell the truth, to
arrive together at the truth, is a...revolutionary act”

--
Antonio Gramsci, L'Ordine Nouvo, 1919

I've
really got to stop reading the left press. I can't even remember the last
time I read an article on the election that came close to operating at a
reasonable level of honesty and intelligence, much less articulating any
serious strategic analysis. The polarization into a "more-radical-than-thou"
camp and a "more-sensible-than-thou" camp is one of the most unfortunate
things to happen to the left since the fall of Barcelona. Last year, we were
able to unite into the strongest anti-war movement in human history; what
the hell happened?

The
Anti-Kerry Camp

I have a lot of respect for
Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo; I think the attacks on them as egomaniacs and
fanatics are simply rude, and the attempts to keep them off the ballot are
disgusting and undemocratic. At the same time, I am extremely skeptical
about the usefulness of their campaign. Many of their supporters are what
might be described as infantile Leninists, and the fact that they are
running independently makes it clear that their ticket won't help anything.

At the same time it is
clear that some people are voting Nader/Camejo in an honorable attempt to
remain committed to their principles. However, questions of principle cannot
be divorced from questions of strategy. We know Ralph Nader will not win,
and I think we can agree that John Kerry will not kill as many people as
Bush. In principle, that is really good enough reason to hope he gets into
office, but it goes further. If we don't have to try to prevent unilateral
aggressive wars, we can bring our attention to the military-industrial
complex and US imperialism throughout the world. If we don't have to fight
the criminalization of abortion, we can fight for reasonable sex education,
welfare for women doing the hard job of raising children, and the rights of
all women to have control over their ! bodies and their lives. If we don't
have to halt attacks on affirmative action, we can work against the
long-standing system of economic apartheid and the cultural marginalization
of people of color. The list goes on. KERRY WILL NOT DO IT FOR US; in fact,
we will be fighting against him, but with him we will have more space to go
to the root of the issues that matter.

The Kerry
Camp

The problem is, I'm not
sure that those leftists urging us to support Kerry are paying enough
attention to that, and I find Michael Moore's
recent article to be symptomatic of this political myopia. Let me say up
front that I admire Michael Moore. He has brilliantly brought a left
perspective to a mass audience and in that sense he is a model for
activists. But Moore's rather meek request that Kerry return to his hippie
roots, placed next to his demand that we not criticize him, is a very
dangerous move. The only way that Kerry can be pushed to the left now is if
we show him that Americans are angry and want real change--not by stating
openly, as many progressives have done, that we’ll vote for him as long as
his name isn't George W. Bush. Knowing that Michael Mo! ore and the rest of
the progressive community will vote for him anyway, he is free to ignore us
and pander to the corporate interests that fund him.

There is a great danger in
simply dissolving our differences with John Kerry, because life will go on
after November. Will activism? I hope so, but the current rhetoric makes me
afraid that once Kerry has won, people will simply celebrate and return to
comfortable complacence. Teresa Heinz Kerry came to speak at Penn State
University and about 3,000 people came to watch or stand outside in support
of the Democratic Party and the ideology of celebrity. But the Human Rights
Film Series, a grassroots effort by and for Penn State’s activist community,
is lucky to get 100 people to come to its screenings, even after heavy
advertising with limited resources. Where are the other 2,900 progressives!
?

A Common
Problem

What makes this bickering
particularly ironic and depressing is that both sides fall into the same
trap of assigning elections much more importance than they are due. Yes,
Bush stole the election last time, and yes, corporations have too much power
over politics; these are both important issues. But the fundamental problem
with our electoral system is that it reduces political decision-making to
choosing bureaucrats to make decisions for us; and in the end, elections
function as an ideological tool to delude us into thinking that we have any
control over the political process. The low level of voter participation
shows that most people haven't been fooled--therefore reforms like instant
run-off voting, proportional representation, public financing and
localization of decision-making would all be good ways to start moving
towards a more participatory society. We should fight for them, and! we
should try to support the Green's safe state strategy as a reasonable way to
start building a third party.

Otherwise, let's just take
the elections at their face-value. It's impossible to make any real or
important changes with an election, whether it is John Kerry or Ralph Nader
or Peter Kropotkin on the ballot; that's not what elections are for. (At
least not here--in Latin America the left has been much better at using
elections to advance revolutionary activism. The Bolivaran circles of
Venezuela, the autonomist movements of Argentina, and the Landless Worker's
Movement of Brazil, although they are operating in very different economies,
should serve as inspiration for American activists.) The only reasonable
approach for radicals to take is to hold our noses and try to prevent the
kind of damage another Bush term will do, and focus our energy on what
really matters: building a grassroots movement in the United States by
moving politics out of the polls and onto the streets. As both
Naomi Klein and
Ted Glick have pointed out, another Bush term would make
movement-building extremely difficult.

But we must be utterly
clear about this: we cannot think of getting rid of Bush, much less building
a movement, unless we tell the truth about the Democrats and articulate our
goals with intellectual rigor. Chomsky points out that ignoring the
differences between Bush and Kerry will make people think that activists
don't care about how ordinary people are affected by an election. In the
abstract, he is correct, but there is one problem. To a population whipped
up in fear by a media that pushes issues of concrete importance out of
political discourse and deluges its viewers with misinformation, it is not
clear Bush's fanatical policies will be more harmful than Kerry's.

Left
Failures

This is due to two failures
of the left. The first is that we have allowed the issue of capitalism to
drop out of public discourse. We have not adequately addressed economic
issues in terms of class, we have not brought attention to the unjust
structure of the workplace, and we have not demonstrated a way to overcome
capitalism. Michael Albert's revolutionary proposal for "participatory
economics," which is getting overwhelming attention among the European
left, is perhaps the first attempt to render democratic socialism into
something comprehensible and concrete, something that can actually be put
into practice, something that can actually be proposed to people who want to
know how we can build an economy that isn't based on exploitation and class
hierarchy. AND THE AMERICAN LEFT ISN’T PAYING ANY ATTENTION! Economic issues
are perhaps the area in which the American people are furthest to the left.
Business Week polls show that 95% of the population thinks business has too
much power. Two-thirds of American adults think that Marx's dictum "from
each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is in the
Constitution. If we had anything close to a decent left in this country, we
would have had a revolution already! But we don't even have a labor
movement. A cursory examination of history will teach us that a vibrant
labor movement is the driving force of radical politics.

But even this is not
enough—which brings us to the second failure. Wilhelm Reich wrote, in an
attempt to understand how the fascists took power in Germany, “While we
presented the masses with superb historical analyses and economic treatises
on the contradictions of imperialism, Hitler stirred the deepest roots of
their emotional being.” While we spend all our time meticulously dissecting
in exactly which speech Bush lied about what, the right has been able to
convince the American working class that they have its interests at heart by
appealing to issues that affect people in their everyday lives: family,
religion, culture, etc. It is their personal lives that people value the
most, but the left has failed to remember the old feminist slogan that “the
personal is political”; it has ignored the rich theory preceding and following
the New Left that sought to extend revolution to culture and everyday life.
Even the populist Michael Moore argues in his recent book that teenagers
shouldn't have sex, thereby guaranteeing that no teenager who reads that
book will ever listen to him again. A radical movement is about developing
public spaces to foster human interaction based on solidarity and diversity;
as Henri Lefebvre put it, revolution is about turning "everyday life into a
work of art." But it seems the left can only speak about elections with any
passion.

The left has been unable to
appeal to a pissed-of working class because it has failed to address
capitalism and demonstrate that "another world is possible."

Telling
the Truth and Winning the Struggle

So let us, as
revolutionaries, follow the dictum above, and be truthful to ourselves and
the American people. Buying into the corporate media's empty debates and
ignoring the issues that we should pay attention to on the left makes us
seem like hypocrites. People know that politicians are corrupt bastards;
that's why they don't vote! If we try to paint John Kerry as some kind of
beautiful hero, people will not trust us. But if we can effectively argue
that getting Bush out of office is part of a wider program of what Andre
Gorz called "non-reformist reforms" directed towards radical change, we will
demonstrate that we are committed to the issues that matter to the majority
of the population. Why is there so much resistance to being honest about
this? Does Michael Moore think the American people are too stupid to
understand that we can vote for Kerry and still struggle! against the
corruption that he represents? Do we care at all about building critical
consciousness and creating a broader base for radical politics?

If being leftists means
spending all our time bitching at each other about an election we shouldn't
bother thinking twice about, leave me out. But if it means struggling to
build a new society, a society that realizes the promises of freedom and
justice, we've got a lot of important work to do. As Gramsci said, "It is
necessary with bold spirit and in good conscience to save civilization...
Are we not ready?"